


All The World's A Stage

by Telenovela



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Gen, HQHols2015, Wizard of Oz References, drama club au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-25
Updated: 2015-12-25
Packaged: 2018-05-09 05:25:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,493
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5527688
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Telenovela/pseuds/Telenovela
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Datekougyou Koukou Drama Club is going to perform The Wizard of Oz as its annual Christmas musical this year, even if it's boring, because club president and director Moniwa has way too much on his plate to deal with anything contraversial. What could possibly go wrong?</p>
            </blockquote>





	All The World's A Stage

**Author's Note:**

  * For [](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts).



> Hi Atharaigas!! Merry Christmas 2015!
> 
> I hope you enjoy this fic - it was a lot of fun to write. I'm hugely sorry for any errors; these should be cleared up when I do a second proofread before the start of January, but until then please do your best to read around them if you do spot any.
> 
> Christmas and being in school always makes me think of the school musical and the ridiculous amount of stress that goes along with all that, and I had a really good time putting poor Moniwa in that situation, haha. Also, Onagawa is my not-so-secret fave, and I think it probably shows.
> 
> Once again, I hope you have a wonderful Christmas and new year, and I'm excited to chat to you after author reveals! xx

On October 1st, Moniwa stands in front of the drama club, script clutched in his hands, and wonders why they don’t look more excited.

“’The Wizard of Oz’ is a classic. It’s the perfect choice for our Christmas play.” He’s aiming for an imploring tone, but apparently it’s not working.  
“It’s kind of boring, isn’t it?” says Futakuchi, swinging back on his chair.

‘Safe’ was closer to Moniwa’s goal in choosing the script. Definitely not ‘harmless’, given the other people in the club, but nowhere near as dangerous as the previous semester’s production of ‘Macbeth’.

“It’ll only be as boring as you make it for the audience,” he says, and prays Futakuchi won’t take the challenge the wrong way.

There’s a bit of muttering, but everyone seems to have resigned themselves to their fate, which is just as well considering Moniwa has already ordered the other script copies. He briefs them on the audition schedule, then dismisses them to start preparing.

“We haven’t done a musical since first year,” muses Sasaya, as the others start to go. “It’ll be interesting to see how well the kouhai cope.”

In hindsight, it’s entirely possible that Moniwa has made a terrible choice of scripts, after all.

 

***

 

The auditions follow a week later.

Nametsu is, of course, going to be their Dorothy, and only really has to audition as a token gesture. Casting the others is more of a challenge.

Moniwa (drama club president and director), Kamasaki (vice predisent and head of set design) and their advisor, Oiwake sensei, sit in front of the stage at a table complete with portable CD player, ready to play the first verse of ‘If I Only Had A Brain’ for each of their auditionees. Aone and Fukiage are sat just behind them, happy to continue as sound and lighting technicians respectively without having to sing in front of an audience, thank you.

Sasaya goes first – his voice is a little off-key in places, but it’s nothing that practice won’t fix, and he’s always been a good actor, strong on physicality and rhythm. Futakuchi is an annoyingly perfect singer, surprising nobody; another easy casting choice.

Next is Onagawa, who shuffles out onto the stage and informs them, deadpan, that he won’t be singing.

“I’m an actor, not a singer. Aren’t there any non-singing roles in the show?”

Moniwa and Kamasaki exchange a look.

“I’m sure we can find something,” Moniwa says, already internally wincing.

Koganegawa Kanji is a very enthusiastic but absolutely terrible singer. On the other hand, tiny Sakunami has a clear, sweet voice.

By the end of the rehearsal, there are enough people to cast the main roles, and the rest of the club to make up a chorus. Oiwake sensei approves the casting, and Moniwa writes the list up formally that night, ready to read out the next afternoon.

 

***

 

“Nametsu Mai – Dorothy,” Moniwa says, and everyone claps as if they hadn’t known who the leading lady would be since before the play had even been chosen.

“Sasaya Takehito – Scarecrow,” he continues, and gives Sasaya a smile. There’s applause again, and a few jokey comments about Sasaya being brainless.

“Futakuchi Kenji – Tin Man,” Moniwa goes on, and there’s a sigh of frustration from Futakuchi.  
“But I’d be such a scary lion!” he protests.  
“The lion will be played by Sakunami Kousuke,” Moniwa says, almost as if Futakuchi hadn’t interrupted at all. The comedic potential of having a tiny lion was much too good to pass up, and besides, Futakuchi’s sense of timing would fit much better with the rusting Tin Man.

“Which just leaves our Wicked Witch of the West,” Moniwa concludes, bracing himself, “who will be played by Onagawa Tarou, if you’ll take the role?”

There’s a beat of silence, before a howl of laughter from Futakuchi. Onagawa looks a little bit like he wants to die.

“Aren’t there any other speaking roles? What about the Wizard?”

Moniwa gives him an apologetic smile.

“The wizard’s lines are going to be pre-recorded so we can time them to fit with the robotic set Kamasaki’s building. It’s the Witch or nothing, I’m afraid.” Moniwa seriously thinks he’s going to say no, and they’ll have to ask one of the girls instead. Onagawa really is a good actor though, and he’d do a great job of it if he committed to the role.

After a minute more of scowling deliberation, he concedes. “I’m not wearing tights, though,” he adds; a last-ditch attempt to save his dignity, made by a man who knows he’s already failed to do so.

Futakuchi is still laughing, casting gripes apparently forgotten. “This is the best early Christmas present ever, Moniwa-senpai. We won’t even have to get him a wig!”

“I want you to know that I hate you all,” says Onagawa, and sinks back down into his seat.

As the others are leaving, a gangly figure with badly-dyed hair stays slumped in one of the chairs. Sakunami is pulling on Koganegawa’s arm, with little effect. Moniwa approaches with caution, a skill learned from a hard year of presidency.

“Is everything okay here?”

Koganegawa lifts his head to meet Moniwa’s eyes, pathetically sad. “Was my singing bad, Moniwa-senpai? My name didn’t get read out for a part, and I was really excited to be in the play…”

Moniwa winces a little.

“Your singing was fine, completely fine! We just didn’t think any of the parts were quite right for you this time, that’s all.”

When Koganegawa still looks upset, he scrambles for ideas.

“Hey, it was your first ever audition! I’m sure if you practice lots, you’ll be cast in the next production with no trouble!”

It still doesn’t seem to be working. Desperate measures are needed. Moniwa takes a breath.

“And besides, how could we cast you when we have a special job for you to do backstage?”

Koganegawa sits up a little straighter.

“A job for me, Moniwa-senpai?”

“Yes! Kamasaki and I talked it over, and we thought you’d be the perfect choice to be our new prop master,” Moniwa tells him, slightly impressed at his own ability to improvise. “It’s really important, and not just anyone can do it, but we think you can handle it. What do you think?”

Koganegawa’s sitting up properly now, almost as tall as Sakunami is standing, and he couldn’t look further from the downtrodden expression he’d worn a moment before. Sakunami, behind him, rolls his eyes.

“I promise I won’t let you down, senpai!!” Koganegawa says, and Moniwa takes that as his cue to leave, because he feels like the boy might be about to jump up and hug him.

 

***

 

Rehearsals start properly the next Monday after school.

It’s gentle at first – they sit together around the CD player to learn the chorus songs, then slowly start to work out dance routines with Obara, who Moniwa has nominated as Dance Captain and chorus leader.

Scene by scene, he takes the lead actors aside to run lines, block movements, practice walking with imagined rusty joints and limbs understuffed with straw.

Kamasaki seems to have talked at least three of their teachers into helping him build the huge, robotic face for the Wizard, designing the parts, working out a mechanism and programming a movement cycle. Sometimes, being the drama club of an industrial school has significant benefits.

When he’s not working on that, he and the other techs are busy working out lighting sequences, who needs which microphone turned on and when, how much time they need to allow for costume changes. The school orchestra is working equally hard to learn the music, but it’ll be a few weeks before they’re ready to even attempt a rehearsal with a live band.

 

***

 

During the first week of November, Onagawa finds a book in his bag which definitely isn’t his. The title reads ‘Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West’. It’s almost definitely another Futakuchi Joke, but Onagawa’s found that often the best way to deal with Futakuchi Jokes is to run with them, so he reads the book regardless.

By the time he’s finished, his characterisation of the Witch is completely changed for the better, and he’s almost ready to  _thank_ Moniwa for casting him as one of the most interesting, subtly-written characters in the show.

Almost.

 

***

 

Halfway through November, they begin weekend rehearsals.

The chorus are getting much better at dancing and singing, although not necessarily both at the same time, much to Obara’s exasperation. Costume measurements are taken, and the group of tiny first years chosen to play the Munchkins look uniformly miserable when shown concept sketches by the textiles club.

Kamasaki spends an entire Sunday drilling and attaching LEDs to his Wizard face, and they get Oiwake-sensei to record the Wizard’s speech so that Aone can alter it digitally and Kamasaki can fine-tune the timing of the programming for the mechanisation. He’s still got the whole of the rest of the set to build and paint, but they’ve got plenty of time, right?

Koganegawa is proving to be a more problematic prop master than Moniwa had anticipated. The way he lays things out on the prop table seems to make sense only to him, and not to the people who actually need the props, and he has a worrying habit of picking props up, walking to the side of the stage to watch the rehearsal, and accidentally abandoning them, to be tripped over by the actors, or worse, actually lost. At least there’s still a month and a half for him to get the hang of it.

In between marking all the prop directions into Koganegawa’s script for him, attending every part of every rehearsal, checking up on the progress of the textile club and orchestra, arranging promotional materials and ticket sales, helping his lead actors to run lines, balancing his school work and his preparations for his upcoming university entrance exams, Moniwa’s having a good day if he’s managed six hours sleep the night before, and things are only going to get more intense.

 

***

 

“Absolutely not.”

“But it would add so much to the performance!”

“No way.”

“We both know Koganegawa’s going to have lost that stuffed toy long before performance night anyway, Moniwa-senpai!”

“Futakuchi, we are  _not_ having a live dog playing Toto.”

“But—“

“You heard me. Now, take it back to wherever you got it from.”

 

***

 

Their first practice with the orchestra, on the first Saturday of December, is nothing short of shambolic.

The timings are all slightly different from the CD they’d been practicing with before now, and the musicians and solo singers are struggling to keep pace with one another. The dancers are tripping over their own feet, forgetting the moves, and Aone realises halfway through that he’s going to have to start from scratch with his microphone settings.

Kamasaki has a beautiful, terrifying, fully animatronic robot Wizard head, and no other set pieces whatsoever. This is approximately the point where he begins to panic.

On the upside, Nametsu is an oasis of calm in Moniwa’s otherwise hellish life. Her lines are learned, her dancing is almost always in time, and she sometimes brings him cans of coffee and tells him to sleep more when Futakuchi and Kamasaki are threatening to kill each other again. Moniwa is seriously considering proposing marriage. He’s taken to doing homework while blocking and re-blocking scenes, because he never has time at home any more, and his teachers are starting to get suspicious.

All this stress already, and there are still three weeks to go.

 

***

 

A week after that, and the costumes are ready.

Sakunami is ridiculously adorable in his huge, fluffy lion mane. Sasaya complains that the loose pieces of straw itch (and Moniwa complains to Kamasaki that they’re falling all over the stage, having to be constantly swept up) but is otherwise happy. Futakuchi is alarmingly cheerful about the silver facepaint and repurposed kitchen apparatus he’s being made to wear, and Moniwa is on high alert for the reason why, whenever it surfaces.

Onagawa takes the long black dress and pointed hat with surprising dignity. Nametsu giggles and twirls, and comes alarmingly close to refusing to remove the ruby slippers.

The Munchkins are predictably unhappy, but you can’t have everything.

Trusting everyone to take the costumes home without losing them or getting them dirty is more of a gamble than Moniwa is willing to take, so they’re boxed up and stored ready for the dress rehearsal. If nothing else, as a good president, he learns from his previous mistakes.

 

***

 

A week and a half before the show, Moniwa gets news that, come Christmas night, they will be performing to a full house.

With tickets sold out and costumes ready to go, there’s a new sense of excitement and energy among the cast. Sasaya’s scarecrow walk has more exaggerated swagger than before, the robotic catches of Futakuchi’s unoiled joints is more awkward, funnier. Sakunami’s cowardly lion cries could melt even Kamasaki’s heart, maybe, if he wasn’t so busy panicking over his still-unpainted set pieces.

Onagawa’s evil cackling reaches a level where Moniwa has to ask him to refrain from doing it unscripted or outside of rehearsals, because it’s upsetting Koganegawa.

The cast gets a rare Monday night off to catch up on homework, while the crew members do their technical run-through. Fukiage’s lighting routine remains as brilliant as ever, with coloured beams for musical numbers, a following spotlight for solos, and plenty of appropriate flashes for magic. He’s even found a rotating filter for the tornado effect at the beginning. Aone’s work is equally good; although they won’t be able to hear the balancing of orchestra and vocals until the dress rehearsal, his SFX cues all fall perfectly when Moniwa reads through the appropriate parts of the script.

Koganegawa is less perfect, still muddling his cues, but Moniwa will be stood in the wings on performance night with a script ready to prompt lines if needed, so he’s absolutely ready to dive in and supervise if a prop hasn’t appeared in time. Everything is going to be fine.

Now all they need to do is bring it all together.

 

***

 

The dress rehearsal is, of course, an unmitigated disaster.

Everyone forgets lines, even Nametsu. The chorus’ singing is mumbled and their dancing lazy, to the point where Moniwa threatens to cut entire numbers from the performance. Obara gets paint all over his Chief Munchkin trousers by kneeling on a step which Kamasaki had forgotten to mention had only been finished half an hour beforehand. During what would be the interval, the ruby slippers go missing, and after a full five minutes of Moniwa shouting at Koganegawa, are found in Onagawa’s shoe locker. When questioned, he just shrugs and says, “It’s _method_.”

If it were possible to delay the show, Moniwa would do it in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, it’s Christmas eve, and the tickets are sold out, and like it or not, they’re out of time.

He and Kamasaki stay at the school until almost midnight, painting the final set pieces, and Kamasaki sleeps on his spare futon, too tired to go all the way back to his own house.

It’s show day.

 

***

 

Aside from having to remind Koganegawa to run home at lunchtime to collect the black tech crew clothes he’d forgotten, the day is almost unsettlingly normal. Moniwa barely notices his classes, just sees the time pass as if he’s outside of it, until the final bell rings, and it’s go time.

They have a few hours left to run the numbers which had been unacceptable the day before, and tidy up any loose ends, then food, changing into costumes or black clothes, and showtime.

The whole cast huddles backstage beforehand, waiting for his final words.

Moniwa swallows, throat dry, then begins.

“Everything we’ve worked for in the past three months has been for this. There’ll be other shows, sure, but you’ll never get another chance to do this performance, or to this audience.” He looks around at the anxious faces, Futakuchi’s usual confidence strained at the edges, Sakunami pale beneath his drawn-on whiskers. “Back when we first chose this script, you told me it was boring. Now it’s up to each and every one of you to prove yourselves wrong.”

He smiles at them.

“Make me proud.”

Aone nods, ever stoic, before he and Fukiage leave for the box in the front of house where they’ll operate the sound and lights from. Nametsu squeezes his shoulder as she walks past to get to the stage, and Onagawa salutes, fingers at the brim of his pointed hat. Koganegawa lets out the first syllable of a cheer, before there’s a hand clapped over his mouth and three people are shushing him.

There’s a buzz of static on Moniwa’s walkie-talkie. The orchestra are ready to go. Everyone is in position.

The curtains open.

 

***

 

Nametsu’s rendition of ‘Somewhere Over The Rainbow’ is honestly beautiful. When the tornado hits, Kamasaki and Obara lift the house together, spiralling it across the stage, invisible in their black clothes. Moniwa himself lifts a large toy cow, apparently caught up in the wind. Koganegawa has even remembered to put the Wicked Witch of the East’s legs out on stage in time, something he’d been struggling with.

“Toto, we’re not in Miyagi any more…” gets a lot more laughs than it probably deserves.

Onagawa is a fantastically evil Wicked Witch. He’s perhaps a little  _too_ in touch with the character, in fact. Nametsu’s fear is probably just good acting. Probably.

After a quick change, Obara (kneeling) leads an adorable and smiling group of Munchkins as they direct Nametsu down the yellow brick road. Sasaya laments his lack of brains, Futakuchi his complete absence of a heart (with no irony lost on his castmates), and Sakunami his desire for courage, complete with _terrifying_ roars which Simba would be proud of.

Kamasaki is a thoroughly horrifying flying monkey, and his animatronic wizard face, while not quite as in time as he’d have liked it, is still fantastical and scary, especially with Oiwake sensei’s robotically altered voice booming out of it at deafening volume.

There are a few fumbled lines, but it’s nothing Moniwa can’t solve by frantically mouthing at people from the wings. The biggest accident comes when Nametsu throws the bucket of confetti at Onagawa, only for it to be empty, never refilled by Koganegawa, but with the sound effects and lighting, and Onagawa’s impassioned, anguished screams, it’s nothing noticeable to the audience.

By the time Nametsu is clicking her heels together, still as neat and elegant as ever, Moniwa feels like it’s gone too fast. He’s not ready yet for the show to be over, to suddenly have a life outside of rehearsals and schoolwork. But the show goes on, as it apparently must.

They get a standing ovation, of course.

Kamasaki drags Moniwa out onstage on their third set of bows, as has become tradition during their tenure as President and Vice, and Koganegawa attempts to lift him into the air, only to be firmly kicked in the shins by Sakunami, who sees what’s happening in time and respects Moniwa too much to allow it. Moniwa is impossibly grateful.

They applaud the orchestra, and Aone and Fukiage, and Oiwake sensei gives a short speech about their hard work. Then they’re grasping hands again for one last bow, sweaty palms pressed together, stage lights hot above them, and the curtain is down, and they’re hugging, and it’s over.

It’s over.

 

***

 

Once their stuff’s packed, they scatter homewards, some with families that came to see them, others walking as if it were just another evening.

Nametsu smiles to herself as she takes her hair out of its braids.

Koganegawa ruffles Sakunami’s hair, and Sakunami steps on his foot on purpose in revenge, but tells him he did well all the same.

There’s a tiny redhead boy, maybe a middle schooler, with his mother and younger sister, who sat in the second row and was the first to jump to his feet during the bows. He accosts Aone with praise the second he steps away from the sound box - Aone seems happy about it, though.

Sasaya’s going to be finding bits of straw about his person for weeks, he swears.

When Onagawa showers, the water runs green for whole minutes before he’s clean. He feels a little sad as it washes away, like shedding a second skin. But at least he never has to wear a dress again. Probably.

After Moniwa gets home, he falls onto his bed, still in his black clothes, still with a script in his hand, crawls under his duvet, and sleeps for fifteen solid hours. It’s the best sleep he’s ever had.

 

***

 

At rehearsal after school on Monday, every single cast member is furious, having found obnoxious, intentional silver handprints all over all their exercise books. Futakuchi is noticeably absent.

Moniwa starts looking for the next script.

__

**Author's Note:**

> Now author reveal day has passed, feel free to come chat to me about Datekou!!
> 
> _greasepaint@twitter  
> midoususie@tumblr


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